The present disclosure generally relates to virtual machine (VM) storage arrays. In particular, this disclosure relates to performing write operations to VM storage arrays by combining accelerated copy requests.
A virtual machine (VM) may be a software implementation of a computing machine (i.e., a computer) that executes program instructions in a manner similar to a physical computing machine. A certain type of virtual machine may emulate an entire system platform which may support the execution of a complete operating system (OS) (e.g., WINDOWS or LINUX). Another type of virtual machine may emulate a single operating system process, which may be useful for running a single program. Software running on a VM may be limited to the resources and abstractions provided by the virtual machine, and may not operate outside of its virtual (limited) environment. Limiting a software application's accessibility to resources to may be useful in protecting certain computing resources (e.g., memory, disk storage) which may be shared with other applications, programs or VMs, from software errors and security-related issues. Current use of virtual machines may include implementations which may have no direct correspondence to any physical machine hardware implementations.
A Redundant Array of Independent Disks, known as “RAID”, may be a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple disk drive components into a logical unit for the purposes of data redundancy and performance improvement. Data stored in RAID systems may be distributed across multiple drives in one of several ways, referred to as “RAID levels”, depending on a specific level of redundancy and performance required. The different schemes or architectures may be named by the word RAID followed by a number (e.g. “RAID 0”, “RAID 1”). Each scheme may provide a different level of balance between the goals of reliability and availability, performance and capacity. RAID levels greater than RAID 0 may provide protection against unrecoverable (sector) read errors, as well as whole disk failure.